Movie studio DreamWorks takes to the cloud

Hello, cloud? Hollywood is calling. That’s right. DreamWorks, the innovative motion pictures studio known for blockbuster animation flicks like Shrek, is so hip to the cloud that it’s now outsourcing 20 percent of its compute capacity to it.

So who’s the lucky beneficiary of all this Hollywood limelight? None other than HP, the world’s largest tech company in terms of revenue, but a relatively new entrant to the cloud services space.

“Last year, we were rendering five percent of our films in cloud. This year, we’re pushing 20 percent of our overall compute capacity to the cloud,” Derek Chan, head of global technology operations at DreamWorks, said at the CloudBeat conference in Redwood Shores, Calif.

Chan added that DreamWorks has been working with HP on cloud-related endeavors since 2003 and continues to work with the company because of its commitment to open technologies and transparency.

HP, which is generally perceived as being behind the curve in the cloud arena, operates a public cloud, based on OpenStack, and prides itself on its contributions to the open source movement, its growing ecosystem, and the visibility it offers customers, HP CTO of cloud services Patrick Scaglia said.

“The notion of building a web infrastructure at scale is important to us,” Scaglia said of HP’s decision to leverage both OpenStack and VMware’s Cloud Foundry.

And the strategy seems to be working, as HP has a least one big believer in powerhouse and uber-cool studio Dreamworks.